Beyond the Art House

By

Richard B. Woodward

Updated Nov. 27, 2012 6:05 p.m. ET

Minneapolis

The Renegades: American Avant-Garde Film, 1960-1973

Walker Art Center

Through Jan. 6

Avant-garde cinema is an ­orphaned art in many parts of the U.S. Ignored by a public that expects moving ­pictures to have plots and stars, and unwelcome in institutions that safeguard older cultural ­artifacts, artists who make short nonnarrative films have in many U.S. cities been forced to establish their own archives. None of the major art museums in Los Angeles, for instance, has a film or video department.

The Walker Art Center has been a refuge on this bleak ­curatorial map for a long time. Its Ruben/Bentson Film and Video Study Collection, founded in 1973, is home to some 900 ­titles that range across the ­spectrum—from
D.W. Griffith
and
Charlie Chaplin
to the more frankly experimental work of ­Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren,
Paul Sharits
and
Stan Brakhage.

ENLARGE

Ernie Gehr’s vibrant ‘Serene Velocity’ (1970).
Courtesy of Ernie Gehr

The Walker’s new exhibition, “The Renegades: American Avant-Garde Film, 1960-1973,” showcases five films and one multiscreen video—from a time when personal filmmaking was veering away from entertainment models and exploring its own material nature. These were years when artists picked up cameras and began to make work that challenged audiences to ­reset their attention spans and their expectations about what a worthy subject of a film should be. The only rules were that you could make up your own.

Rather than attempt a ­comprehensive survey, the Walker’s film curator
Sheryl Mousley
presents some of the starkly divergent ways that artists treated moving images during this period of upheaval. Even more thoughtfully for some visitors—and contrary to the belief that films and videos by artists always run to excessive lengths—she has chosen six works that ­together last less than an hour.

Hollis Frampton
’s “Lemon” (1969) is the bracing introduction. An example of structuralist cinema, which emphasizes the basic film elements that ­determine the experience for the viewer, it is nothing more than what the title describes. In one single, uninterrupted shot, we watch for more than seven minutes as a lemon on a table is illuminated from the side, its fleshy yellow contours glowing brightly and then turning into a silhouette as the light fades away.

With “Lemon” playing on a 16mm projector in a large, dark room, it is impossible not to be aware that the camera is heightening our awareness—on a single object, on time’s passing, and on the rhythms of day and night. But with an artist as witty as Frampton, it is also possible he is razzing the high-budget pretensions of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Released a year earlier, that outer-space ­opera had a similar scene, except with constructed “planets” ­instead of store-bought fruit, and to the accompaniment of a pompous Straussian fanfare ­instead of silence.

Ernie Gehr
’s “Serene Velocity” (1970) is even more uncompromising. A camera looks down a corridor in an anonymous office building for 23 minutes, as Mr. Gehr’s zoom lens flips back and forth between two focal lengths every few frames so that the static shot vibrates continuously. The perspective and the throbbing colors have sexual overtones crazily at odds with the dull ­institutional scene and fluorescent lighting. To stare too long at Mr. Gehr’s film, however, could bring on a seizure in an epileptic, and it’s not much more fun even for those not so afflicted.

The mood is decidedly gentler in Swedish filmmaker
Gunvor Nelson
’s “My Name is Oona” (1969). This wistful portrait in moody black-and-white of her young daughter, running wild as a tomboy or in princess costume, is like a fairy-tale wish by a mother that her little girl never have to grow up. It’s too bad that an adorable blond child riding her horse on the beach is perilously close to a 1960s California cliché. Transferred here to digital video from 16mm, the film also loses some of its original flavor. But the soundtrack by Ms. ­Nelson’s friend
Steve Reich,
featuring the harsh repetitive speech rhythms that interested the composer at the time, adds some needed steel to Ms. ­Nelson’s poetic musings.

The two most inviting works here may be “Mothlight” (1963) by Stan Brakhage, who pioneered drawing and scratching on celluloid in the style of an abstract painter; and
Bruce Baillie
’s ­“Castro Street” (1966), an impressionist documentary of an oil refinery near San Francisco. Mr. Baillie’s film was chosen in 1992 for the National Film Registry.

Brakhage’s lyrical masterpiece is so brief (four minutes) that only with repeated viewings can its careful structure be appreciated. Made by pressing objects—moth wings, spiders, flower ­petals, leaves, blades of grass—between two sheets of clear ­Mylar and then processing them through an optical printer, the film moves from browns and ­yellows to splotches of red, green, purple, each fleeting color shift and imprint of a natural form having an emotional weight. The images flutter through the projector like an ­insect buzzing against a screen door on a hot summer night.

Mr. Baillie’s overlapping ­pictures of ships and railroad cars, of signage, semaphores and smoke, is like a West Coast ­version of the classic 1920 urban documentary “Manhatta” by
Paul Strand
and
Charles Sheeler.
It’s hard to decide which is more engrossing: Mr. Baillie’s soundtrack, which mixes distorted machine noises and captured sounds off radios, or the slowly dissolving industrial shapes. Both are evidence of his acute editing skills.

The crowd-pleaser is
Bruce Conner
’s “Three-Screen Ray,” his 2006 raucous video homage to soul music and America composed, in part, from a documentary film he made in 1961. Black-and-white images, splashed on wall-high screens, are synched to
Ray Charles
singing his hit “What’d I Say.” Along with ­performance shots, Conner has edited in found footage—film leaders, women modeling brassieres, Mickey Mouse, missiles and guns. The sexual content and the editing rhythm play up the orgasmic call-and-response ­between Charles and his female backup singers, the Raelettes.

Much as I want to hear Ray Charles in almost any setting, his voice is so pervasive that it drowned out the atmospheric clangs and whistles of Mr. ­Baillie’s “Castro Street,” even when I was wearing the supplied headphones. (The perennial problem—how much to let noisy films and videos “bleed” to other rooms in a show—is poorly ­resolved here.)

Even though most of the films in this exhibition can be found on YouTube or elsewhere online, such digital-video images are usually a low-fidelity version of the originals. Modern art ­museums like the Walker, with up-to-date theaters, are the ideal venues for preserving and ­presenting cinematic material beneath the notice and care of the movie studios.

Not that some video companies aren’t making inroads here, too, in better approximating the special qualities of film. Criterion released a well-regarded two-disc DVD anthology of Brakhage’s films in 2003, as well as a two-disc collection of Frampton’s work just this year. If you can’t be in Minneapolis before Jan. 6, they are the next best thing.

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